Would your business suffer if it had a hosting outage or data loss?
Is a senior employee leaving, and you need a temporary CTO to help navigate the transition?
Or are you suffering right now, and you need in-depth technical & business advice from an expert?
Let me help!
I’ve personally helped hundreds of individuals and businesses overhaul their hosting, as co-founder and former MD of British technology company Bytemark. I sold the company in 2018 after 16 years, with a turnover of £3.3m and more than 2400 customers.
Bytemark built its own hosting products, support team and data centre from the ground up. I led the way on many of its projects with both software prototypes and recruitment plans for whole teams.
So I understand agencies and small technology companies who are punching above their weight.
I can build cheap hosting in short order, or work on whole platforms for companies with larger ambitions - I avoid both the expense and complexity of popular cloud platforms.
All my advice is backed by 16 years experience of founding, running and managing a bootstrapped technology company that has had a global impact.
Past projects
I wrote the first lines of code for all of these projects at Bytemark, though most were taken over by the team:
- Hiring by anonymous interview, a recruitment system through which Bytemark brought in its new staff since 2015 and helped eliminate the gender pay gap in the company.
- BigV, the company’s general-purpose cloud hosting system from 2012.
- pairvm, a failover hosting system optimised for one client who needed to run their 1970s software with zero down time.
- mauvealert, a universal network and server monitoring system.
- bgpfeeder, a small, programmable implementation of BGP for distributing routes.
Technical skills
These are my current specialisms:
- Back-end programming: Ruby, Rails
- Systems programming: Linux, C, C++, Java, Go
- Databases: MySQL, PostgreSQL
- OS: Debian, Ubuntu & Redhat Linux
- Containers: Docker
- Automation: Ansible, Puppet
Availability and rates
I work remotely from York, UK, but I’m happy to travel where that’s necessary. I’m available for longer contracts from May 2022.
My day rate is £1280. But I’m friendly and will offer a lot of early advice without charge.
Feel free to contact me on matthew@bloch.tv - please put EMERGENCY in the subject line if you need a fast reply.